Speciesism

[8][9][10] Studies from 2015 and 2019 suggest that people who support animal exploitation also tend to have intersectional bias that encapsulates and endorses racist, sexist, and other prejudicial views, which furthers the beliefs in human supremacy and group dominance to justify systems of inequality and oppression.

[26] Carl Cohen, Nel Noddings, Bernard Williams, Peter Staudenmaier, Christopher Grau, Douglas Maclean, Roger Scruton, Thomas Wells, and Robert Nozick have criticized the term or elements of it.

[31] In his 1789 book, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, he wrote:[31]The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withheld from them but by the hand of tyranny.… [T]he question is not, Can they reason?

English naturalist Charles Darwin, writing in his notebook in 1838, asserted that man thinks of himself as a masterpiece produced by a deity, but that he thought it "truer to consider him created from animals.

We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer asserted that anthropocentrism was a fundamental defect of Christianity and Judaism, arguing that these religions have been a source of immense suffering for sentient beings because they separate man from the world of animals, leading to the treatment of animals as only things.

[36] Secularists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, advocated for animals based their stance on utilitarian principles and evolutionary kinship, critiquing the Christian church's neglect of social justice and acceptance of suffering as divinely ordained.

[39]: 135 An 1898 article in The Zoophilist, titled "Anthropocentric Ethics", argued that early civilizations, before Christianity, viewed tenderness and mercy towards sentient beings as a law.

The article claimed that this understanding of human-animal kinship persisted into early Christianity but was challenged by figures like Origen, who saw animals as mere automata for human use.

In 1895, American zoologist, philosopher, and animal rights advocate J. Howard Moore described vegetarianism as the ethical result of recognizing the evolutionary kinship of all creatures, aligning with Darwin's insights.

[42] In his 1906 book The Universal Kinship, Moore criticized the "provincialist" attitude leading to animal mistreatment, comparing it to denying ethical relations among human groups.

[43]: 276  He condemned the human-centric perspective and urged consideration of victims' viewpoints,[43]: 304  concluding that the Golden Rule should apply to all sentient beings, advocating equal ethical consideration for animals and humans:[43]: 327  [D]o as you would be done by—and not to the dark man and the white woman alone, but to the sorrel horse and the gray squirrel as well; not to creatures of your own anatomy only, but to all creatures.The term speciesism, and the argument that it is a prejudice, first appeared in 1970 in a privately printed pamphlet written by British psychologist Richard D. Ryder.

He wrote that, at that time in the United Kingdom, 5,000,000 animals were being used each year in experiments, and that attempting to gain benefits for our own species through the mistreatment of others was "just 'speciesism' and as such it is a selfish emotional argument rather than a reasoned one".

Ryder wrote: In as much as both "race" and "species" are vague terms used in the classification of living creatures according, largely, to physical appearance, an analogy can be made between them.

It became an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1985, defined as "discrimination against or exploitation of animal species by human beings, based on an assumption of mankind's superiority.

"[50] In 1994 the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy offered a wider definition: "By analogy with racism and sexism, the improper stance of refusing respect to the lives, dignity, or needs of animals of other than the human species.

"[51] The French-language journal Cahiers antispécistes ("Antispeciesist notebooks") was founded in 1991, by David Olivier, Yves Bonnardel and Françoise Blanchon, who were the first French activists to speak out against speciesism.

[54] In Italy, the contemporary anti-speciesist movement has two main approaches: one that takes a strong, radical stance against the dominant societal norms, and another that aligns more with mainstream, neoliberal views.

[61] Scholars including philosopher Peter Singer and botanist Brent Mishler have argued that speciesism is analogous to racism, the belief that some human races are superior to others.

[62][63] In the 2019 book Why We Love and Exploit Animals, Kristof Dhont, Gordon Hodson, Ana C. Leite, and Alina Salmen reveal the psychological connections between speciesism and other prejudices such as racism and sexism.

[65] Other studies suggest that those who support animal exploitation also tend to endorse racist and sexist views,[9][65][66] furthering the beliefs in human supremacy and group dominance in order to justify systems of inequality and oppression.

[56][69][70] There is not yet a clear definition or line agreed upon by a significant segment of the movement as to which species are to be treated equally with humans or in some ways additionally protected: mammals, birds, reptiles, arthropods, insects, bacteria, etc.

This question is all the more complex since a study by Miralles et al. (2019) has brought to light the evolutionary component of human empathic and compassionate reactions and the influence of anthropomorphic mechanisms in our affective relationship with the living world as a whole: the more an organism is evolutionarily distant from us, the less we recognize ourselves in it and the less we are moved by its fate.

[73] Piers Beirne considers speciesism as the ideological anchor of the intersecting networks of the animal–industrial complex, such as factory farms, vivisection, hunting and fishing, zoos and aquaria, and wildlife trade.

[14] Amy Fitzgerald and Nik Taylor argue that the animal-industrial complex is both a consequence and cause of speciesism, which according to them is a form of discrimination similar to racism or sexism.

Not surprisingly, these and numerous other sources of speciesism are so ideologically profound that those who raise compelling moral objections to animal oppression largely are dismissed, if not ridiculed.

[4]: 420 Philosopher Carl Cohen stated in 1986: "Speciesism is not merely plausible; it is essential for right conduct, because those who will not make the morally relevant distinctions among species are almost certain, in consequence, to misapprehend their true obligations.

[86] Paola Cavalieri writes that the current humanist paradigm is that only human beings are members of the moral community and that all are worthy of equal protection.

In the chapter "The one true tree of life" in The Blind Watchmaker, he states that it is not only zoological taxonomy that is saved from awkward ambiguity by the extinction of intermediate forms but also human ethics and law.

[90]Dawkins elaborated in a discussion with Singer at The Center for Inquiry in 2007 when asked whether he continues to eat meat: "It's a little bit like the position which many people would have held a couple of hundred years ago over slavery.

[97] These groundbreaking laws foreshadowed and influenced the shifting attitudes toward nonhuman animals in their rights to humane treatment which Richard D. Ryder and Peter Singer would later popularize in the 1970s and 1980s.